Do Your Garage Doors Get Stuck from Winter Ice Buildup?

During 2006, we replaced our old, wooden sectional garage doors with newer trim-looking metal insulated garage doors. Very nice looking garage doors, I must admit. Though the new garage doors were not the very top of the quality scale, they certainly were not the bottom, either. Our new garage doors fell somewhere in the upper-middle, as I recall when making our selection. At the same time, we replaced the garage door electric openers too, as one of the existing ones had failed, and the other was getting old.

The new garage doors and garage door openers were installed by contractors normally engaged in such installations, and hired by the home center where we purchased the garage doors and garage door openers. The initial installation went well, and appeared to be good, quality workmanship.

The new garage doors and garage door openers worked very well through most of 2006 New England weather, until we had some ice-storms and wet, freezing rains, which built up ice at the base of the new garage doors. Upon attempting to open the garage doors with the garage door openers, both of the garage doors remained "stuck" in the ice that had formed below and around the rubber seals at the base of the garage doors. As the garage door openers attempted to pull the garage doors free, the top sections of each garage door buckled, so it was about 2 inches from its original "flat" position. Only after I kicked the bottom of the garage doors free did they finally release from the ice.

These particular garage doors apparently are not reinforced too well across the top sections to prevent them from buckling the way these did. I am not certain whether such reinforcement is available in pricier models, but in retrospect, it might have been worth looking into that last year when we were making our selection! Nonetheless, I was able to straighten the sections back to approximately where they belong, but I am still not pleased that these garage doors would suffer such damage from what the old, wooden garage doors seemed to take in stride for many years!